When Lady Liberty Triggers Trump Supporters

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/vogue-statue-liberty-jlaw-breitbart-september.html

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Vogue’s September issue is to the fashion world what the Super Bowl is to football, and on Wednesday the glossy magazine unveiled four covers for next month, all featuring the actress Jennifer Lawrence. On one cover, she is dressed in a crimson gown, leaning on the rail of a ferry with the Statue of Liberty glowing behind her. “American Beauty,” reads the cover’s text. “Jennifer Lawrence on love, liberty and the freedom to be herself.”

The image is classic. Indeed, you might even call it conservative. But that’s not how some prominent Trump supporters saw it.

John Carney, the Breitbart News finance and economics editor, took to Twitter to express his outrage over Vogue’s “attack.”

This from the editor of a website that regularly lambastes those on the left for being fragile snowflakes.

The irony of a Breitbart editor seeming to crave a trigger warning for a magazine cover didn’t go unnoticed. Some people cheekily asked if he needed a safe space. Others just wanted clarity about whether or not he was joking.

“Just a thought, but maybe if you’re triggered by the Statue of Liberty the United States of America is not the right place for you,” one response read.

Another person asked: “Just to be clear here — the Statue of Liberty is now a microaggression against conservatives?”

In response to the backlash, Mr. Carney posted on Twitter, “The reaction by leftists to my criticism of Vogue’s cover is all the proof you need about its political content.” In a subsequent post, he wrote, “If you want the Statue of Liberty to be a non-partisan symbol of America, don’t make her central to your case against immigration reform.”

Here, Mr. Carney appeared to be referring to the White House adviser Stephen Miller’s cringe-worthy attempt last week to brush off Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus.” He argued at a White House news briefing that the soaring poem (“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ….”) was added to the statue after it was given to the United States by France and therefore isn’t meaningful. The twisted argument was Mr. Miller’s sorry attempt to back President Trump’s plan to cut legal immigration into the United States.

Here’s a bit of unsolicited advice for Mr. Carney, Mr. Miller and any other Trump supporters trying to smear Lady Liberty:

The Statue of Liberty is perhaps the most fundmental American icon. It has expressed our country’s highest ideals for 130 years. Trying to tarnish the statue that has welcomed the ancestors of Bruce Springsteen, Colin Powell, Jerry Seinfeld, Martin Scorsese and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to name a tiny handful, is a doomed mission.

Also, Mr. Carney, if you send me your address, I’d love to buy you a copy of the issue. I’m guessing you haven’t read the interview with the cover star, but you’d do well to.

“We can’t continue this divide and anger,” Ms. Lawrence says in Vogue. “There are issues affecting us as human beings, not as liberals and not as Republicans. We have to protect the foundation of this country, and acceptance. If you’re preaching acceptance, accept immigrants, accept Muslims, accept everybody.” I suspect Lady Liberty would agree.